After you've mastered the simple
shell and the second shell, you're ready to tackle
this shell, which falls into the complex shell
category.

If you find this tutorial useful,
I'd really appreciate if you would send me an e-mail
with the subject line of "Complex Shell" so I can
get some indication of how many people are reading
it.

Note that I use the Swiss system to
describe carving tools in all of my carving
tutorials.

I'm going to use a piece of 3/4"
Honduras mahogany for this project because that's
what I happen to have available right now.

The layout of this shell is fairly
complex. There's a lot of things to lay out so the blank can get
busy fairly quickly. Because of the complexity, it's not a shell
that can be made small - there's too much detail that you
wouldn't be able to carve if the shell was small. For that
reason, the shell I'm going to do is about 4" across.

We layout the shell before we cut
the blank. So our shell will be laid out on the 3/4" mahogany.
We begin by drawing a circle with a 2" radius. Then draw a
vertical line through the circle. Use a combination square to
draw the line.

Then draw a line
perpendicular to the vertical line, and 1/4" below the center of
the circle. This will be the bottom end of the lower flutes on
both sides.

Next, using a set of dividers, step
off three equal divisions, on each side, between the top and the
line you just drew. These points will be the ends of the convex
flutes. Later, we'll mark the location of the ends of the
concave flutes.

Now draw a horizontal line 3 5/8"
from the top. This will be the lowest extent of the shell. The
shell is not completely round - it's wider than it is tall.

For the next few steps, we're going
to focus on the lower extent of the shell - the bottom of the
shell proper and the two hinge parts on either side (side note:
on real scallops these are called "ears").